Whew. What a roller-coaster ride. And not just recently. The whole thing. Approaching year three at light speed. I'm happy with what I've been able to accomplish so far (with little to no money.)

On this Thanksgiving (thanking everyone who gave a little this past week ... and a thanks to Mike Tuesday (liquidtuesday) for the great Risk photos. I've been wanting to use them for a while now and thought they were appropriate for this piece...) Anyway, reflecting recently, I'm sensing that I'm near a turning point.

Hello, world. Just popping in again real quick to share some thoughts. Mostly concerning the Myers-Brigg INFP personality type as it relates to grassroots journalism.

It appears Tim Porter started blogging again on the 12th of this month with this post. (He was, I believe, working on News, Improved.

This isn't my site, but when I noticed it today, I thought I had to share it.

After all the brouhaha (or is that brou-mua-haha) last week with The Star Press, I had a great example of cooperation yesterday with Al Jordan, the person who runs ElwoodIndiana.org (he's hesitant to call himself a journalist, although he's getting closer and closer to replicating the 'real newspaper' in Elwood online - with a thriving community to boot...)

Well, at least according to their TOS on one of their sites. It came up in this thread on The Star Press' forums. I asked who owned material submitted to Gannett for their new 'Get Published!' section. (With a follow-up on why they didn't make that information more prominent when dealing with citizens.) Now, maybe I don't understand the jargon in that phrase, which is quite common if you Google, but "exploit" is such a nasty word, ya know? Says a lot, I think.

This is pretty funny. So the Armed and Famous show ran tonight, right? I've been running Google ads (til CBS came in and upped the bid to some unknown high dollar amount!) Anyway, tonight at the MFP Forums, we had a few out-of-towners stop by to give their thoughts on the show. As a journalist and new media publisher, I told them we were the underdog in town and that they might like to go to The Star Press' forums.

Well, it seems that 'citizen journalism' is finally a newsworthy topic at The Star Press. No, they haven't finally decided it would be wise to at least mention Muncie Free Press once or twice. They have, though, started their own citizen journalism effort. It's being spearheaded by Phil Beebe (who used to be the Sports Editor...) I've submitted a piece on Muncie Free Press, which I imagine will be shot down like all my other attempts at coverage. (For the record, they did let me buy a classified ad...)

EDIT TO ADD: Hmm. Just noticed another business promoting themselves via their Armed and Famous blog. They're moderated comments there, so I know someone approved it...Screenshot...

There is lots of talk about Susan DeFife leaving BackFence.com. They've laid off 12 of an 18 person staff. Ouch.

I've launched (kinda - it's still a work in progress ;) Local Journalism Dot Net, a site concentrating on what all the various citizen journalism sites are doing and have done.